23 Years Ago, Amazon Gave Barnes & Noble a 1-Click Patent Lawsuit For Xmas (aboutamazon.com) 54
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In recognition of the innovation and unique nature of 1-Click, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Patent No. 5960411 to Amazon.com for 1-Click on September 28, 1999," boasted an Oct. 1999 Amazon press release. "First made available to Amazon.com customers in September 1997, 1-Click combines with Gift-Click and Wish List to make Amazon.com the most convenient, easiest-to-use shopping destination this holiday season."
The following day, Amazon weaponized its new patent, filing a lawsuit on Oct. 20th saying defendant and competitor Barnes and Noble had illegally copied Amazon's patented 1-Click ordering technology. "We're pleased that Judge Pechman recognized the innovation underlying our 1-Click feature," said Amazon CEO and 1-Click co-inventor Jeff Bezos in a Dec. 1999 Amazon press release celebrating a preliminary injunction that barred barnesandnoble.com from using its 'copycat version of 1-Click technology' while the lawsuit was pending (Amazon and B&N settled in 2002).
"The patent system is designed to encourage innovation on behalf of customers," Amazon had written in its 1999 press release, arguing that in 1997 its 1-Click technology "was a significant step forward for online shoppers that required thousands of hours of effort." It's been noted that B&N first threw down the litigation gauntlet, slapping Amazon with a lawsuit over its marketing claim as "World's Largest Bookstore" just days before Amazon's IPO in May 1997.
USPTO continuity records show a 'child' patent of the original Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network patent finally expired due to non-payment of maintenance fees on 10/10/2022, more than 25 years after Amazon applied for its 1-Click patent on 9/22/1997.
The following day, Amazon weaponized its new patent, filing a lawsuit on Oct. 20th saying defendant and competitor Barnes and Noble had illegally copied Amazon's patented 1-Click ordering technology. "We're pleased that Judge Pechman recognized the innovation underlying our 1-Click feature," said Amazon CEO and 1-Click co-inventor Jeff Bezos in a Dec. 1999 Amazon press release celebrating a preliminary injunction that barred barnesandnoble.com from using its 'copycat version of 1-Click technology' while the lawsuit was pending (Amazon and B&N settled in 2002).
"The patent system is designed to encourage innovation on behalf of customers," Amazon had written in its 1999 press release, arguing that in 1997 its 1-Click technology "was a significant step forward for online shoppers that required thousands of hours of effort." It's been noted that B&N first threw down the litigation gauntlet, slapping Amazon with a lawsuit over its marketing claim as "World's Largest Bookstore" just days before Amazon's IPO in May 1997.
USPTO continuity records show a 'child' patent of the original Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network patent finally expired due to non-payment of maintenance fees on 10/10/2022, more than 25 years after Amazon applied for its 1-Click patent on 9/22/1997.
Boycott (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hear, hear. And I wish I had a mod point I could give you.
My second and final purchase from Amazon was more than 20 years ago. It took me two purchases to realize what Jeff was doing with my personal information and I do NOT like being manipulated. My freedom is worth more than a better price. Not funny how the so-called Libertarians treat other people's freedoms when it comes to putting money in their own pockets.
And that was long before I knew what a monopsony was or had defined "corporate cancer" to my o
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"The patent system is designed to encourage innovation on behalf of customers,"
That's how it was designed. How it's used is for big corporates to file for oceans of frivolous, trivially obvious patents that they can then use to crush any possible competition.
they patented an idea (Score:4)
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What do you think patenting an idea means? You can discuss the thing they patented, argue about it, study it -- there were simply very few cases where you can reduce it to practice (implement the invention) without their permission. And the original patent expired five years ago, so now you can go nuts implementing it.
In particular, what do you think the difference was between Amazon's patent and (say) an auto manufacturer's patents for things in a car engine?
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Re:they patented an idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. See, for example, https://www.engadget.com/2017-... [engadget.com] . Normally a utility patent like that expires either 17 years after issuance, or 20 years after it was first filed, whichever is later. In Amazon's case, it was the 20 year limit.
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What do you think patenting an idea means? You can discuss the thing they patented, argue about it, study it -- there were simply very few cases where you can reduce it to practice (implement the invention) without their permission. And the original patent expired five years ago, so now you can go nuts implementing it.
In particular, what do you think the difference was between Amazon's patent and (say) an auto manufacturer's patents for things in a car engine?
An auto manufacturer's patent is for a very specific physical shape and design, with detailed description of how to build something that otherwise didn't exist, and there are likely near-infinite ways to build an engine that don't violate the patent. Amazon's patent was for "a button (already existing, thus not patentable) that causes a purchase to occur (existing process, so not patentable) without putting something in a cart and doing a bunch of unnecessary steps (not patentable)", along with a descripti
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Okay, so you have an assertion that the idea is "utterly trivial". Why didn't anyone do it before? Most patents involve some combination of previously discovered ideas being combined in novel ways. The fact that this idea combined several unprotected ideas doesn't mean it cannot be patented.
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Okay, so you have an assertion that the idea is "utterly trivial". Why didn't anyone do it before?
Who else even had an online store to be *able* to do it before?
That patent was filed way back in 1997. At that point, Amazon had been selling stuff online for three years, but otherwise, online selling was pretty much nonexistent other than eBay, Craigslist, and shareware payments. Sears *started* selling things online that year. It was a year after that before J.C. Penney or Barnes and Noble started selling things online, and three years before Walmart did. Online e-commerce was quite literally in its
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Okay, so you have an assertion that the idea is "utterly trivial". Why didn't anyone do it before?
Because it was generally considered a bad idea to complete a purchase without additional confirmation by the user. There was no technical reason that other web sites couldn't do it; in fact, not doing it was the technically more difficult method.
In patent law, "novel" also means "not obvious", where "obvious" is commonly defined as something that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" could come up without undue effort. Pretty much any web developer that knows how to implement "click a button" and "comp
Re: they patented an idea (Score:1)
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In particular, what do you think the difference was between Amazon's patent and (say) an auto manufacturer's patents for things in a car engine?
1-click would be a like a 1-engine patent for cars (and motorcycles). "A vehicle which is propelled by a singular engine communicating motive force to a plurality of wheels." It wouldn't mention FWD or RWD, differentials, drive shafts, or even have a picture of any gears. Just the concept of one engine, multiple wheels, and moving. All things already invented by others and being used for the purpose they were invented for.
But Henry Ford wasn't able to patent the concept of a car.
An auto manufacturer is
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If you don't see how fucking retarded your analogies are, you belong in an institution for the mentally incompetent. If you do, you are a troll.
A single engine in a car was the original design. The straightforward analogy to shopping for an online store is "you put things in your cart, then you go to check out". Amazon's one-click shopping patent reduced the friction for customers to buy stuff from them. It has nothing to do with whether one can "see" software. (Relevant factoid: It's possible to paten
Design this (Score:2)
I need to point out again that it wasn't necessarily a silly patent. An easy implementation, once the idea is out, is not an impedement.
Back then, the idea of not confirming something important just couldn't fit into a programmer's mind. It just wasn't done.
Once someone thought of one-click purchases (and saw it worked as an improvement), well then it is suddenly a great, unpatentable idea.
No, my fellow programmers. In fact, you are utterly terrible at product design [amazon.com]. You should be kept well away from i
Re:Design this (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't a silly patent, it was a stupid one, because it's just another "on a computer" patent. Getting something out of a vending machine by pushing one button should have been considered prior art.
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Which vending machines let you do that without putting money in (while still collecting payment from the user)?
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Amazon doesn't let you make purchases without providing payment, either.
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So, you have in mind vending machines from the 1990s or earlier that keep your payment details on file, and know who just walked up and pressed a "buy now" button?
Do you have any documentation that such vending machines actually existed?
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A bar.
Or just about anyplace where you can have a tab or account with payment already on file?
Not like this is new, or even was new 20 years ago...
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Are bars "vending machines" now?
I don't spend a lot of time in bars, but in my experience, usually they either hold the credit card or expect you to close the tab before leaving. There are some other relevant differences between a bar and Amazon that might occur to you if you think for a bit.
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One of the criteria is supposed to be obviousness [theregister.com]. This was not reviewed in the challenge to the one click patent here in the US.
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Also, every shop keeper in history that ever agreed to just put a regular and trusted customer's purchase on their tab dating back a few centuries.
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Onlty to the unimaginitive or those who would rather not see the point.
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Nah. I actually discussed implementing a one-click like system a year BEFORE Amazon. The coding was simple and obvious. The problem is that it was a small business and couldn't afford the merchant account penalties from probable charge-backs. Amazon's only 'innovation' in that deal was being too big for a credit card to write off as a customer.
There have been way too many patents like that where "nobody's done it before" not because they didn't know how, but because the situation didn't call for it to be do
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It was a silly patent because it wasn't their invention. Cookies allowed returners to be recognized. That was the core of the idea and it wasn't theirs.
Once cookies are available, 1-click was beyond obvious and trivially simple.
Re: Design this (Score:2)
IIRC, there were cookies before 1997.
That's not enough, in the same way that the existence of steam is not enough to mean that stream engines exist.
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You also need to team and lawyers and lots of money to patent something. Not everyone has that.
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IIRC, there were cookies before 1997.
That's not enough, in the same way that the existence of steam is not enough to mean that stream engines exist.
Cookies identify a returning person or continuing session. "Identify" in this context means that they are linked to some sort of account information. That is the invention - that's what cookies do and did already. What information one puts in that linked account is up to you but each combination of possible types of information is not an invention unless you come up with something very unexpected. For a website selling things, credit card details is not unexpected or original. The fluff in the application a
Re: Design this (Score:2)
That the invention is obvious after it's patented does not mean it was obvious beforehand. If it was, a. How come nobody was doing it, and b. How come they didn't patent it first?
I'd hold that:
- Using a cookie for persistent login that expires after a given number of days if not refreshed
- Using a cookie to track a user to sell personalized advertising
- Using a cookie to directly store data, like shoe size or sexual preference
- Using a cookie to manage affiliate content across different sites
- Using a cooki
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You should be kept well away from it, and let dedicated product design specialists handle it.
You make it sound like programmers were the problem.
But these things need to be negotiated at the highest level. It's not like you can just ignore PCI compliance and payment standard practices. If your own lawyers don't shut you down, the payment processors will, and those guys don't mess around.
No, if you want to make such a change, you need leverage, you need to have personal access to the big wigs at Visa International and the other payment networks, and you need to pay those guys extra in order for them
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I need to point out again that it wasn't necessarily a silly patent. An easy implementation, once the idea is out, is not an impedement.
Back then, the idea of not confirming something important just couldn't fit into a programmer's mind. It just wasn't done.
Huh? The shipping and billing information was already in the system and associated with the user. Skipping the fill-in steps wasn't some great epiphany, it was an obvious step once you had repeat customers and enough technical stability to start adding bells & whistles.
That's the big problem with patents like one-click. There was no special R&D effort at Amazon, it was just incremental development of the most advanced/mature platform of the time. And as a result they ended up with a bunch of silly p
One click? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever manage to make a purchase on Amazon's site with one click. Me neither.
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Only by accident. Cancelled it and I think I turned the feature off too.
Has the patent expired? (Score:2)
Asking for a friend.
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Yes, in September 2017.
When??? (Score:4, Informative)
When a story is posted on xmas eve with the title 23 Years Ago, Amazon Gave Barnes & Noble a 1-Click Patent Lawsuit For Xmas it implies that Amazon filed the lawsuit either on xmas, or very close to it. That would be quite notable for bad taste and be a decent explanation for why the story was posted today.
But from the summary:
The following day, Amazon weaponized its new patent, filing a lawsuit on Oct. 20th saying defendant and competitor Barnes and Noble had illegally copied Amazon's patented 1-Click ordering technology.
So the lawsuit was filed in October, nowhere near xmas, and it was done 23 years ago, hardly a notable anniversary.
Which raises the question... what does this article have to do with anything?
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Hey! It's after Easter so it's almost Xmas.
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Hey! It's after Easter so it's almost Xmas.
Found the retailer.
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Headline is mixing up the filing date with the date the preliminary injunction was handed down. If anything we should have had this back in October and instead of xmas it should have been for Halloween.
From the press release the injunction was Dec 1st, so xmas season (probably deliberately, since they were fighting over xmas sales) but hardly xmas.
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Headline is mixing up the filing date with the date the preliminary injunction was handed down. If anything we should have had this back in October and instead of xmas it should have been for Halloween.
From the press release the injunction was Dec 1st, so xmas season (probably deliberately, since they were fighting over xmas sales) but hardly xmas.
The lawsuit was filed in October and the headline states that they gave them a lawsuit for Christmas. You give a lawsuit when you file it not when the judgment comes down. So it should not be xmas, or even xmas season.
I'll tell you what's really sad (Score:2)
A patent for one click...
Seriously...
This kind of stupid shit started mostly with software patents. The obviousness of many software patents, like the stupid XOR patent, defies common sense and insults the intelligence of real inventors of today and of yesteryear. It's like the USPTO started to hire baboons as reviewers to save on salaries in the 90's and 2000's...
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--Homer Simpson
EU rejected the same patent for "obviousness." (Score:3)
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A WSJ reporter wrote a critical article... (Score:2)
... that somehow was never published. Shocking, eh?
I don't recall her name any more, but I explained during our interview that it was a wrong-headed patent because it wasn't a non-obvious idea, just a stupid one. Storing user-specific data associated with a persistent browser cookie is a very obvious idea and many, many web sites were doing so from the time that Netscape invented the browser cookie for that very purpose -- the stupid parts were the risks of impersonation and compromise of server-side securi
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